Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is the obvious inspiration for The Woman in the Window. (Girl on the Train’s alcoholic, voyeuristic Rachel can’t be overlooked, either.)

Author A.J. Finn, a gender-neutral pseudonym for former William Morrow executive editor Daniel Mallory, knows his classic movies (there’s even a character named Jane Russell!).

Like James Stewart in Rear Window, Anna Fox is a shut-in who spies on her neighbors with a telephoto lens. Unlike Jimmy Stewart, Anna isn’t wheelchair-bound with a broken leg; she’s a child psychologist paralyzed by panic attacks.

Her husband and young daughter have moved out (why?), so Anna keeps herself occupied by mixing pills and booze, running an online chat for fellow agoraphobics and spying on the new neighbors across the park who paid $3.45 million for a “landmark 19th century Harlem gem!” of a brownstone. (Million Dollar Listing New York has nothing on this novel.)

Then Anna sees what appears to be a bloody murder through the window…but nobody believes her.

USA TODAY says ★★★ out of four. “There’s something irresistible about this made-for-the-movies tingler. Finn knows how to pleasurably wind us up.”

The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen; St. Martin’s Press, 343 pp.; fiction

Vanessa has suffered the ultimate New York humiliation: She’s been dumped by her hedge-fund husband, Richard, and now she’s determined to stop Richard’s remarriage to her “replacement.” Is it sheer jealousy, or something else?

It’s late in this century, up on the moon, and Jasmine Bashara, nicknamed Jazz, is a struggling 26-year-old Saudi citizen who has lived in Artemis, a lunar city of 2,000 diverse earthlings, since she was 6.

Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children by Sara Zaske; Picador, 239 pp.; non-fiction

America may be the land of the free, home of the brave, but it's Germany whose children display independence and whose parents have the courage to take a step back, writes Zaske, who with her husband moved from Oregon to Germany, toddler in tow.